Ether Dome

About this audio guide

This guide to the Ether Dome at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston opens with the ether frolics of 1830s temperance-era Ireland and college towns, where partygoers sniffed or swigged the stuff and stumbled through walls feeling nothing. It follows dentist William Morton, who connected that numbing effect to the screaming ordeal of surgery without anesthesia, and the skeptical crowd of doctors who had jeered a rival's failed demonstration in this same room a year earlier. Look up at the tiered wooden benches ringing the room where that crowd once sat.